Cobra - 1986 - 7 Million Stars

Actors: Sylvester Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen

Director: George P. Cosmatos

I wanted to give this 8 million stars, but I felt that was a bit extravagant. Where to begin with Cobra? Its 80s pop soundtrack where, after killing a terrorist, the music opines that the title character has been 'workin' too hard'? Its place in the pantheon of a proud tradition of films that endorse Fascism? (Dirty Harry and Boondock Saints come to mind immediately, I'm sure there are many others). From its opening sequence where a bunch of weirdos click axes and claw hammers together in some sort of unexplained ritual, I knew this was going to be one of the greatest movies of all time, and it delivered. Cobra is a Stuffed Crust pizza with extra cheese - the director wastes no opportunity to be ham-fisted (or should that be cheese-fisted?). I could discuss this movie forever, but it's one I definitely should have seen 15 years ago. I try not to say this about anything, but when it comes to a film like Cobra, I don't think they quite make them like they used to.

Family Nest - 1977 - 4 Stars

Actors: Laszlone Horvath, Laszlo Horvath
Director: Bela Tarr

Does anything not depressing come out of Eastern Europe? That area of the world seems to be a leader in misery per capita. I'll save my reader(s) an Iron Curtain pun.

Family Nest is perhaps the most 'realistic' movie I've ever seen. Three generations of a Hungarian family, due to housing shortages, is forced to live in a tiny apartment. Each member has separate interests. People want to move out but they cannot, so what can they do?

Aside from a scene that feels exploitative, Family Nest evokes Cassavetes at his best. Characters talk but they rarely listen. Characters express their needs knowing full well the people listening cannot possibly meet them. Recommended for anyone who wants to check out a Tarr film without having to sit through all of Satantango.

Hidden Fortress - 1958 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Misa Uehara

Director: Akira Kurosawa

I sometimes wonder why most of Kurosawa's great films take place during the same time period in Japanese history. I suppose I don't know enough about Japanese history to say - most of my knowledge of the time period was cribbed from the beginning of the instructions to Nobunaga's Ambition. Still, there's a combination of lawlessness and terror during this period - fief rulers are concerned only with conquering other fiefs, and the average person suffers; towns are empty of young men, bandits and deserters rule the roads, and food shortages seem to be a constant problem.

Hidden Fortress, besides being an enthralling film, looks at how class distinctions can subsist even after rule of law has broken down. Our two 'main' characters are lowly vagabonds, lorded over by the authoritarian Mifune. The two constantly bicker and believe they are conspired against at every turn - they look to betray Mifune whenever possible. Regarding Mifune's conspiring, they turn out to usually be right and yet are usually hilariously wrong. I won't give away any more than that, except that I have absolutely no idea how Kurosawa managed to film the opening ten minutes of the film.

Paranoid Park - 2007 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Gabe Nevins, Taylor Momsen

Director: Gus Van Sant

Note: Minor Spoilers Ahead

What's most interesting to me about Paranoid Park is that it easily could have been a forgettable genre movie. It's not going to be the sequel to Gleaming The Cube, but there's the skateboard element, the unfortunate circumstances element, the 'will he or won't he' element. The script would need some touching up - everyone in this movie actually talks like a teenager, which makes them awkward and mumbly.

Still, Van Sant tells the story all out of order, he leaves out many elements that another film would include, and a possible climax happens near the beginning of the film. I'm not sure if I would be so forgiving towards another director for doing this, but the characters are the focus regardless.

Black Swan - 2010 - 4 Stars

Actors: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Why is monomania the subject du jour of films? We've got two of the top three contenders for Best Picture last year heavily featuring it (Black Swan, The Social Network). All four Darren Aronofsky films I've seen have featured it - whether one wants to call it monomania or obsession, I don't know. Aronofsky characters are internally driven to seek out the one thing that seems to make them forget that they are imperfect and human.

Black Swan both manages to avoid gimmickry and remains compelling even if the main character is (outwardly) not. There's some trademark Aronofsky moves which are still novel despite being used more often in other films - frequent cutting, a camera being affixed to a person so it follows them around. I don't know what to say about the larger themes, because I'm really trying to resist the interpretation that this movie is about Method acting and art generally. Regardless, the thing I'll most likely take away from this is Natalie Portman's performance - it's completely fearless.

White Heat - 1949 - 3½ Stars

Actors: James Cagney, Virginia Mayo

Director: Raoul Walsh

I think movies used to rest more on acting than on anything else. Older movies usually don't have interesting visuals or clever writing - it is up to the actors to make the film compelling. While this film had to be shocking at the time, featuring a mother-son crime duo, this gimmick is well-known to anyone who saw Kindergarten Cop. So it's on the actors' shoulders to make it work, and James Cagney certainly succeeds as the protagonist. Still, this movie's difficulty is where its sympathies lie, because it's not really with Cagney, but it's also not really with those who oppose him either. The climax is certainly inspired, though - and, actually, I thought of Mann's Heat. Los Angeles is full of great shooting locations like this, it's a shame we don't see them more often.

Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work - 2010 - No Rating

Subject: Famous comedian Joan Rivers

Director: Ricki Stern, Annie Sundberg

So much of the entertainment that existed before my birth has been reduced to caricature and parody by the ravenous maw of comedy. It's interesting what lies behind that caricature - what the person is without the hooting commentary. Joan Rivers is a person I knew more for red-carpet interviews and plastic surgery, but as it turns out, she's an incredibly hard-working comedian. This documentary follows her for a year, around to Indian casinos in the Midwest and theaters in Edinburgh.

The constant undercurrent to this documentary is how difficult show business is for older entertainers. How does a person re-invent themselves when they have fifty years of history in the public consciousness? The answer is that they can't, but they can continue to perform until people stop showing up to see them.

The King's Speech - 2010 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush

Director: Tom Hooper

Note: Minor Spoilers Ahead

While The King's Speech is superficially about a stammering king who needs to consult with an eccentric speech therapist to cure his problem, the film is actually about the overwhelming political importance of acting and theater. Is it any wonder that this film won an Oscar? It unintentionally panders to Hollywood's basest and most self-congratulatory instincts.

The King's Speech is a marvelously acted film, and takes all the right turns at all the right places. The direction has some interesting choices, too - long takes, people positioned intentionally off-center in the frame - that make a talky film more visually appealing. Still, it's difficult for me to see past the artifice - I suppose I'm just glad that the United States doesn't have a fucking king.

Family Plot - 1976 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Karen Black, Bruce Dern

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Family Plot is Hitchcock's last film, and it's not one of his best. Still, while this sort of story isn't particularly compelling or new, Hitchcock does have some interesting visual ideas. This movie isn't like the best Hitchcock, which burrows into your head and puts you into the frame of mind of one of the main characters. Here, we actually know more than the characters, putting us outside any of them. Still, it's worth a look if you've blazed through all the best Hitchcock already.

It's also strange to see a Hitchcock film where people curse.

The Other Guys - 2010 - 3 Stars

Actors: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg

Director: Adam McKay

The Other Guys's plot revolves peripherally around high finance, and over the credits, there's a lot of animated graphics about Bernie Madoff, Goldman Sachs, and the 'bailout'. Really, The Other Guys? A movie starring 4 top actors plus another ex-top actor, shot in Manhattan, with multiple car chases and egregious product placement - this film can't even pretend it's not part of the System. It cost a fortune to make and its primary goal is to entertain and therefore make a profit.

I don't normally like Will Ferrell, and again here he's hit or miss for me. His best quality as an actor is his blitheness - he acts as though his thoughts and actions are completely normal. Wahlberg plays a terminally angry character, so much so that the movie even comments on one of his shouting episodes. All in all, the film was mildly entertaining, with some decent laughs, but it won't be toppling any corporate power structures anytime soon.

The Last Temptation Of Christ - 1988 - 4 Stars

Actors: Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel

Director: Martin Scorsese

The Last Temptation of Christ could be one of the most ambitious films I've ever seen. A re-telling of the Gospels in a colloquial fashion, with some added 'facts' about Jesus scrawled in the margins of the film, it's no surprise that this film was controversial. It's amazing to me that it was even made.

It feels tasteless to say that Dafoe nailed this role, but his mixture of warmth, cool, joy, wrath, and mercy are perfect - he hits all of those notes when he has to. Harvey Keitel is also brutally effective as Judas Iscariot, who cares more about freedom than salvation. The film feels uneven - alternately rushing through the source material, then pausing for long stretches. I'm not sure if that comes from the novel or was Scorsese's choice - either way, the film feels like it should be either a half-hour longer or shorter. Still, I wouldn't hesitate to put this in a list of Scorsese masterpieces.

The Social Network - 2010 - 'Like'

Actors: Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake

Director: David Fincher

What is there to say about The Social Network? It's a thoroughly entertaining film. It traffics in hoary tropes of class and the alienated genius. Everyone speaks in a Sorkin-esque staccato, firing out words as fast as they can be said, almost like they are typing them instead of saying them.

All of that sounds like I didn't much like the film, but I would give it 4 stars. Eisenberg is perfect as the stone-faced Mark Zuckerberg - he's completely unreadable. What does he want? What is he thinking? It's the question that guides the film - Sorkin and Fincher neatly edge us to the outside of Zuckerberg's inner circle by the end of the movie.

A downfall of the film is its reliance on a frame story and flashbacks as vehicles - while frame stories in and of themselves aren't bad, it does make the ending less tense. I suppose there's a difference when everyone going to the movie ostensibly knows part of the story - that Facebook is wildly successful. Still, the flashbacks and frame story rob the film of some narrative power, even if we do get Zuckerberg sniping at his adversaries and telling baldfaced lies to lawyers.